Genesis Báez Groundcover

Brooklyn-based artist Genesis Báez grew up between the northeastern United States and Puerto Rico. Primarily photographic, her work considers relationships to place, community, imagination, migration, the natural environment, and their intersections. For this commissioned project, Báez produced a series of large-scale images, nestling them among the tall grasses of a unique site under the Gardiner Expressway, revealing the ever-changing nature of the area’s ecology.

For this commission, photography is considered a material process through which Báez co-creates in collaboration with the natural forces of earth and water. The artist re-photographed historical images depicting the Gardiner Expressway—the city’s primary thoroughfare connecting the southern reaches of the Greater Toronto Area, and under which The Bentway is sited—fragmented and in various stages of its construction during the 1950s and ’60s. She then buried her negatives under the highway, where, intermingling with the silt, mud, and water collected from its drainage pipes, stormwater, and weather systems, they evolved, generating unpredictable new images. The environmental elements intrinsic to the site transformed her works—rather than the original image being destroyed, a new one was compounded in its wake, echoing the evolution of the area’s ecology from before the Gardiner’s construction through to the present day. 

Presented as temporary billboards in the bioswales underneath the Expressway, Báez’s Groundcover evinces her multilayered, cross-temporal, and geographical approach. The passage of time brings drastic change to the appearance of a city, and the transformation of the artist’s re-photographed and buried images parallel these changes, speaking to earth and water as primary constants in this evolution. This work embraces photography’s potential to move, alter, and shift perspectives, prompting us to consider the unfixed quality of our environments and our relationships to them. 

Curated by Alex Rand

Presented by The Bentway Conservancy in partnership with CONTACT, hosted by Fort York National Historic Site